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Thursday July 5th 2012

I was agonising my way through a review of Ted this morning (preview: it’s not brilliant) when I stumbled upon Music Is Better Than Words, a 2011 Grammy-nominated swing album released by none other than Mr. Idea Balls himself, Seth MacFarlane. And yes, that’s its actual cover art.

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Seth covers 14 swing, jazz and big band standards across the course of the album (two of which are duets with Norah Jones and Sara Bareilles) and as far as I can tell, does so with absolutely no sense of irony in play. Even when he sings the word ‘Frigidaire’:

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Even when he squeezes this noise out of the word ‘tight’:

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Even when he does a little breathy pause before saying ‘hello’:

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It’s disorienting stuff for anyone familiar with MacFarlane’s always-on sense of irreverence, used to such hit-and-miss effect in his bizarrely long-running TV shows, but it’s also something of a relief, because we’ve finally found the thing that Seth MacFarlane would take the piss out of Seth MacFarlane for if he wasn’t Seth MacFarlane. A fucking swing album? It’s comedy gold. I can almost smell the hilarious Family Guy cutaway to the time Peter accidentally opened for Seth MacFarlane at Carnegie Hall wearing nothing but a pair of oversized clown shoes.

I’m not entirely sure what the etiquette is on posting longer clips, but I’ll leave you with the first minute and a half of Seth MacFarlane and Norah Jones’s cover of Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Two Sleepy People’. If you enjoy it, you might like to buy the full album at Amazon.

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